


Taurus Season

by leiascully



Series: All The Choices We've Made [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cars, F/M, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 09:17:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14829551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Ford stopped making Tauruses in 2018.





	Taurus Season

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S11  
> Author's Notes: It made me emotional, so why wouldn't Scully be a little nostalgic?  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

“Did you see this?”

She blinked at the screen of Mulder’s phone and gently pushed his wrist until it was at a distance she could focus on. Technology changed but Mulder didn’t. She couldn’t count the near misses with magazines and file folders, the threat of papercuts across her cheeks. 

“Ford isn’t going to make Tauruses anymore,” he told her before she’d had a chance to actually read the headline. That was also standard procedure. Mulder was a scrolling marquee of odd headlines and interesting trivia. He was the original clickbait, drawing her in with his promises to change her world and alter her perception. 

“No more Ford Tauruses?” she murmured, astonished. “What are they going to make instead?”

He shrugged. “Big-ass trucks, probably. Gotta keep rolling coal.” 

“I’m not even going to ask what that means,” she said, only half-listening. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was trying to tally up all the hours she’d spent in Ford Tauruses, beige, white, or silver. Professionally bland. She’d slept in the front and back seats (once waking up most of the way through a truly spectacular sex dream about fucking Mulder in the back of a Taurus, maybe that one, it wasn’t as if she could tell them apart). She’d had what felt like a thousand meals in them, mostly fast food salads. She’d driven them probably tens of thousands of miles. It felt like leaving her old apartment (and it felt like she’d spent more time in a Ford Taurus than she’d spent in her apartment). How strange. How the world moved on. 

She’d understood her sentimental reaction to the basement office, to the view from their bench by the Potomac, even to the drive to work, despite the traffic around the Hoover Building. She hadn’t expected to be sentimental about a car she’d only ever rented, not even owned. Even then, there was the convertible in California. A rented Ford Taurus was the equivalent of a peanut butter sandwich without jelly. Still, she’d driven them all over the country. Something she couldn’t quantify was tucked into the glove compartments, crumpled in the cup holders. At least she’d grown comfortable with things she couldn’t quantify, after all those years with Mulder, bickering back and forth in another anonymous rented Ford Taurus, each one slotted away in the rental company parking lots like so many manila folders. 

They’d left a part of themselves in a herd of Tauruses (though they’d never acted out her sex dream there - it was too mundane to fuck in a Ford Taurus if you weren’t a teenager with no other options). There would still be Tauruses for a decade or so, but the fleets would diminish as the cars stopped running one by one. 

God. At least Proust had madeleines. Surely she could find some worthier trigger for her nostalgia than a mid-size American sedan with roughly the same design scheme as a dentist’s waiting room.

And yet. Mountains and deserts and endless plains framed by the windshield. Sunrises and sunsets glaring off the visors as she tried to stretch herself to block the brightest light. Files read. Classic songs sung along to. Sunflower seeds eaten (mostly Mulder) and bad coffee gingerly sipped. Easing up the passenger seat on its rails after Mulder had been lounging in it. Mulder lifting her bags out of the trunk though she was perfectly capable of doing it herself. Rain and sleet and snow pushed away by the wipers. The slow slow slide from fascination into love. She’d grieved in those cars, and once or twice wept in them. She’d wrestled with maps. She’d wrestled with ideas. She’d seen mysterious lights from the passenger seat and watched trains rattle their way past, the sound of their wheels the same as the ache of the road in her bones. 

“I didn’t think this would hit you that hard,” Mulder said. He was watching her shrewdly. He put his finger and thumb to his mouth, as if he were about to slip in a sunflower seed. Force of habit, she thought. He’d mostly given them up (mostly). 

“I didn’t either,” she said.

“It’s all right, Scully,” he said. “We grew up together in Ford Tauruses.”

Yes, she thought, though that wasn’t quite it. 

“Remember...” he began, and oh, yes, she remembered, and their stories unspooled the way the roads did, crisscrossing the map of their past.


End file.
